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Sunday, July 24, 2011

New Driving Rules In Merida

Yucatan’s legislature passed a new law in February 2011, with a set of rules that takes a mere 288 pages to describe. A brief scan of Yucatan’s new "Rules of the Road" offers definitions of cars, passengers, pedestrians, underpasses, and even fire hydrants, with additional sections on who is allowed to install topes, what you are supposed to keep in your Emergency Road Kit, approved types of cellular phone usage and another 250 or so odd pages on baby seats, helmets, insurance requirements, emissions testing and drug testing. We now have laws governing everything from "no red lights on top of your car" to the red lights required for night-time use as part of your emergency kit, and from fire extinguishers to fines based on one-hundred times the Minimum Wage.

There is even a whole section on the special officers in Bright Yellow Vests who will help guide us through the first 180 days of Yucatan’s plan for implementing the key points of the new road rules, in what looks to be a lifetime’s worth of Spanish-English translations of legalese.

Where The Rubber Meets The Road Rules

So what we all want to know is the nitty gritty, the details, where the rubber meets the road (especially this one!), where the tough get going while the meek go home, whether to run with the big dogs or stay on the porch, to be or not to be… yes, there are a lot of questions, and that is only one of them.

After reading it through, we think this is the bottom line: There are so many details in this 288-page law that it staggers the mind to imagine any single article like this one that could accurately and completely describe and condense what may be as many as 4,050 details that are catalogued here.

Frankly, there are so many requirements and miniscule details covering Peritos (the name for the special police officer that comes out to investigate auto accidents. These officers are specially trained and work for SSPPE del Gobierno del Estado de Yucatan) to peatones (pedestrians), that Yucatecan officers could study for a year to learn just one half of the rules they are supposed to enforce. Not to mention that it could take a decade to get a state full of laid-back Yucatecans to comply.